The slow pace of talks between Hamas and Egyptian mediators on Cairo’s proposal for a Gaza ceasefire is raising speculation in Israel over whether the Islamist group is playing for time, hoping to get a better deal once Barack Obama is sworn in as U.S. president on Tuesday.

Israel also has been in no rush to call off the offensive it began on Dec. 27 with the declared aim of ending Hamas rocket attacks on its southern towns.

It now has only less than a week left to put into motion a threatened third phase of the campaign, an all-out push into densely populated Gaza cities, while its strong ally, President George W. Bush, is still in office.

The bloodshed has opened faultlines in the map of Middle East diplomacy, with the Bush administration in its final week standing behind Israel, Europe pressing Israel to call off its attacks and Arab leaders speaking out against the Jewish state.

For Israel, too, waiting for Obama — who has promised to make Israeli-Palestinian peace an early priority for his administration — could have its advantages.

The way Obama, who last July visited the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a frequent target of Hamas rockets, deals with the Gaza war could set the tone early for his Middle East policy and provide an initial answer to the question being asked in Israel and the Arab world: To what extent, if any, will he soften Bush’s pro-Israeli stance?

Gaza was the place where, in Biblical times, the Jewish hero Samson took up with a harlot. That was before he met Delilah and, succumbing at last to her charms and tricks, revealed the secret of his strength. Shorn of his curly locks while he slept, Samson lost his superhuman strength. He was taken to Gaza and blinded by the Philistines with a white-hot poker. But his hair, and his strength, gradually grew back unnoticed, and at last Samson pushed over a pillar in their temple and brought the building down upon them, killing many. Or so the Bible story goes.

After 38 years of military occupation, Israel handed Gaza back to the Palestinians in 2005. But it has not led to peace. Hamas Islamist militants opposed to the Jewish state in 2007 ousted those Palestinians disposed to make peace with Israel, and have fired crude but potentially lethal rockets into the land lying to the east for months, in a constant skirmish with the Israelis. Israel struck hard with an aerial offensive a week ago.

Now, as the battle unfolds on 24-hour satellite television, you can check out the Gaza Strip on Google Earth, an impressive view from space of this cramped slice of land, shaped like a dog-bone along the southeast Mediterrean Coast. It’s small, it’s tightly built-up. It is bordered by fertile sleepy Israeli kibbutz villages of citrus groves and roads lined with eucalyptus trees. And fields now churned up by Israeli armour.

On Saturday, an Israeli pilot in an aircraft too high to identify inscribed enormous contrail circles in the blue sky over the Strip — one, two, three, four, until it looked like the Olympic rings or an Audi badge. They were visible even from Jerusalem. They were still hanging there, losing definition and dissipating slowly in the evening as the sun went down, turning the sky markers a warm pink.

Was this was some enigmatic sign? Who knows? But Saturday saw the heaviest bombardment of the Israeli offensive, by air, land and sea, from dawn till after dark. And before midnight everyone had the answer to the question of the hour. Israel launched a long-anticipated ground offensive.

Israel has not permitted foreign journalists to enter Gaza via the crossings it controls. Reuters’ team of television cameramen and photographers, and the agency’s lone text correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi, have had little rest and no reinforcement from outside. That has so far proved impossible. Israel’s Route 232 running north-south a few kilometres east of Gaza’s 40 km border – you can see it clearly on Google Earth — is a closed military operations zone, access barred by many police roadblocks and patrols, and, deeper in, by military police. Most TV crews must film the bomb blasts from a distance, talking on their mobile phones between air strikes and fiery blasts.

Probing too far in the direction of the Gaza border is pointless. The army has barred the road with concrete blocks and heavy steel barriers in places where civilians are not supposed to go. A Humvee full of soldiers is in no mood for conversation and wants to see papers. “Do you have a camera?” is the first question. The .50 calibre machine-gun on the roof swivels automatically, its field of fire displayed on a video-screen inside the armoured vehicle. “Do not come back here,” says the young officer. “It is dangerous.” The gun points at the little car.

But the real danger is a couple of kilometres to the west, in Gaza, where yet another column of black smoke mushrooms upwards, Saturday’s umpteenth. The death toll in Gaza is over 500. On Route 232, the odd banality of war is on show. A migrating flock of impressive geese lands in a luscious green field to feed, honking contentedly as another distant bomb thumps the air. Further south, black-winged buzzards wheel over the livestock pens of a remote kibbutz, spying something there to eat.

(An Israeli Apache gunship flies over the northern Gaza Strip after firing a weapons system January 4, 2009. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants battled in Gaza on Sunday after Israeli troops and tanks invaded the coastal enclave in the most serious fighting in the conflict in decades. REUTERS/Nikola Solic (GAZA))

(Smoke rises after an explosion in the northern Gaza Strip January 4, 2009. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants battled on Gaza City’s outskirts on Sunday after Israeli troops and tanks invaded the coastal enclave in the worst fighting in the conflict in decades. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis (GAZA))

Saying he was answering a request from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to help out with Israel’s “PR”, or public relations, during its current Gaza offensive against Hamas, right-wing Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu gave a series of interviews to foreign media on Tuesday, including Reuters in
Jerusalem.

It’s not every day that a leader of a country’s main opposition party serves as what journalists call a “flak”, or PR spokesman, in support of political rivals.

With Israeli military forces in action against Hamas, it’s a time for unity, Netanyahu explained, six weeks before Israel’s national election.

Since Israeli air strikes began in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Bibi, as Netanyahu is popular known, has been taking a back seat to Defence Minister Ehud Barak of Labour and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, leader of the ruling Kadima Party.

Some TV time, even on foreign news stations — many of which are received by viewers in Israel — can’t hurt, especially when an opinion poll on Sunday indicated that Livni was chipping away at Netanyahu’s lead ahead of the Feb. 10 ballot.

In the big battle scene in the movie Braveheart, terrified whispers ran up and down the ragged ranks of sword-waving Scots that the English were ranged before them with “500 heavy horse” – armoured cavalry of devastating power in those days.

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” — the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

Saturday is my day off from being Reuters correspondent in Gaza and I usually sleep until noon.  This Saturday things didn’t go to plan.

My 7-year-old son Abdel-Rahman and his sister Dalia, who is 12, came home early from school, as they have been doing their mid-term exams, to wake me up and ask me to take them for breakfast at a seafront restaurant not far from Gaza’s port.

We got in the car, and for some reason I didn’t take the usual coast road. The decision probably saved our lives.

We had barely taken our table overlooking the sea when we heard one explosion, then another, then a third.

Abdel-Rahman began to cry and Dalia covered her ears with her hands.

I rushed to the front to have a look and saw smoke pouring from the area of the port, and a series of explosions. I figured it was air strikes. Then I heard the roar of Israeli jets.

I radioed my colleagues in television and pictures and told them what I had seen. I tried to phone Reuters’ Jerusalem office — but the mobile phone signal died.

I went to the restaurant’s reception and called the office, but I had to keep running back to my children and wife, were, to calm them down.

“Dad, don’t leave us,” cried Abdel-Rahman. Dalia wept. “Dad, I am afraid. Why? Why did that happen? Do they want to kill us?”

I had no answer as the explosions continued to rock the place that is our home.

I was getting reports by radio about locations that had been hit, including the main police headquarters and another security compound near our house.

What later emerged was that more than 225 people had been killed in dozens of air strikes against the Hamas-ruled strip. Israel said the attacks were in response to daily rocket fire by Gaza militants, which intensified after Hamas ended a six-month ceasefire. On Saturday, one Israeli man was killed by a rocket after the Israeli strikes began.

My wife tried to call her friends in the house, but couldn’t get a signal. Then one of her friends got through to her and told her that there was shattered glass everywhere and the sky overhead was thick with smoke.

So we had to stay put in the restaurant and I had to struggle between coping with the tears of my children and the need to get to my office in Gaza.

Colleagues warned me against driving as my car could be hit if I unwittingly drove near any of the security compounds that the Israelis were attacking.

Then there was a lull in the bombings, and I put my family in the car. I took back roads, and drove as fast as I dared with hundreds of people milling around the streets.

“Dad, be careful,” Dalia said.

We arrived home to see that the adjacent Hamas security compound had indeed been bombed, and there were crowds in the street.

“I saw body parts and some people had their heads cut off,” one man said. “It was a real massacre, Israel has started a war,” said another.

In the compound, ambulance workers were still carrying out the injured as bodies, uniformed and in plain clothes, lay on the ground. Women wept and children huddled in the arms of their mothers and fathers.

Once again access to the Gaza Strip is in the news. This time, perhaps a little self-servingly, because foreign journalists are being denied access to Gaza by Israeli authorities.

The Foreign Press Association, which represents the collective interests of the international media covering the news in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, has filed a law suit with the Supreme Court demanding Israel lifts its ban on journalists entering Gaza. It has been in force for nearly three weeks, since violence flared with Israeli army raids and air strikes and Palestinian “Kassam” rocket fire from the coastal enclave.

The ban has raised eyebrows in Israel - where many are fiercely proud of a vocal and boisterous media which operates largely free of government interference save for a rarely-invoked military censorship law in matters of national security.

In an editorial in the leftist daily Haaretz, the paper says that “shutting out foreign journalists is an act of punishment that gives Israel and her democracy a bad name.” An unnamed Israeli official told the mass-selling Maariv newspaper on Monday: “Israel is being portrayed as trying to put a lid on free speech and to restrict the freedom of the press. We are losing because foreign journalists are busy with Israel’s decision to close the crossings in their faces and not with the real story, which is the firing of Kassam rockets.”

Reuters, along with other international news agencies, is less affected by the ban because we maintain a fully-staffed bureau in Gaza covering events as they unfold. But for the scores of foreign journalists who rely on travelling in day by day from Israel to be on the spot themselves to cover the story – the ban is especially difficult.

Even for the large media organisations based in the region, access to and from Gaza is a perpetual headache.

Trying to get equipment and supplies in to keep our bureau running, or trying to get colleagues out for medical treatment, overseas assignments or training can often seem like a lottery – sometimes easy, other times impossible.

“Putting the ‘porter’ back in ‘reporter” is the wry joke that does the rounds when a group of journalists sets off across the several hundred metres of rubble-strewn no man’s land that lies between Israel and Gaza as we hand-carry diesel fuel or computer equipment for our bureaux, or school shoes for our colleagues’ children.

Getting in to Gaza wasn’t always like this – and the changes at Erez crossing are a sign of how far the situation in the region has deteriorated in the last decade and how far away the combatants still are from a lasting solution.

A fragile truce agreed in June between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, has brought a degree of peace over the last few months – but access to Gaza has not been eased by Egypt or Israel, who control the border crossings.

In the absence of a resolution Gaza remains blocked and Gaza’s civilians have to endure life in what they call the world’s biggest prison.

Faced with these hardships - Gazans have shown typical human ingenuity to have some access to the outside world - as evidenced by the smugglers who use tunnels under the Egyptian border to bring in weapons, people and even cows.

Also refusing to take a closed land border as an impediment - these activists who wanted to highlight the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and recently took to the high seas to get their point across

And who can forget these images of the flood of people who rushed across the Egyptian border at Rafah after Hamas militants blew down the fence to enjoy a rare and fleeting taste of freedom outside the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip and the Israeli towns and farms surrounding the Palestinian enclave spent a quiet morning on Thursday after a ceasefire deal came into force after dawn between the Jewish state and the  Hamas Islamists who rule Gaza’s 1.5 million people. The absence of mortars and improvised rockets falling on the Israeli side of the border and of Israeli air strikes and ground incursions on the other were welcomed by ordinary people. For Palestinians in Gaza, the biggest hope is an increase in supplies which Israel has kept under tight blockade since Hamas seized control a year ago.
Both sides, as well as Egypt which mediated the deal over several months and the international powers, have plenty of reasons to see the truce work . The UN even told Reuters it could help pave the way for UN peacekeepers in Gaza.  But equally there are plenty on all sides who are already saying it is as doomed as previous “calms” between Israel and Hamas, which has been shunned by Western powers for its refusal to give up violent tactics such as suicide bombings and Gaza rocket salvos. Not least among the apparent pessimists has been Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has warned the peace may be short-lived. Olmert has plenty of critics who would happily use that adjective of his own career - the prime minister has promised to resign if he is indicted in a corruption investigation that has already seen an American businessman testify to handing Olmert large sums of cash stuffed in envelopes. The premier has survived a series of such scandals in his two and a half years in power and he again denies all wrongdoing. However, his enemies, including within his own coalition government, are circling and could vote next week to dissolve parliament and start the process of triggering an early election .

So how is Olmert fighting back? By making himself seem indispensable to Israelis as a peacemaker on all fronts, some say. As well as U.S.-sponsored talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, begun last November,  he has lately revealed Turkish-mediated talks with Syria, a desire to open negotiations with Lebanon and progress in talks with Hezbollah on exchanging prisoners. Not to mention today’s truce with Hamas. So can Olmert stave off the public prosecutor and keep the peace?